All about Internet Relay Chat

DroneBL has gone opensource on the 15th of May. This blacklist for tracking infected machines started out as a research project by Nenolod and a friend back in 2003, and is especially suited to be used on IRC networks.

It was developed under a company both friends had in networking equipment and firmware, with main focus towards security. “In late 2004, NodeRebellion went out of business due to lack of interest. At this time, DroneBL was shutdown, and the codebase was transferred to myself personally”, Nenolod explained to IRC-Junkie.

Until April 2007 not much development took place, but interest form the outside was still present, and the project was resurrected using atheme.org’s infrastructure. This was necessary as the previous sponsors’ server was rooted in November 2006. “Due to interest in the blacklist, I subsequently opensourced the code on May 15th.”

“I believe that open sourcing the blacklist software will result in users in the community becoming more involved with improving the DroneBL service”, Nenolod explains. ” So far, there has not been anything submitted, but I think with time this will change. Additionally, I think we’re the only currently active blacklist that has fully opensourced their backend software. I hope that other blacklist projects will take this as an example.”

Feedback from the user community have been positive, and interest has been increased. Nenolod’s expectations are that the opensource move will increase speed in development and improve the service overall.

“I would especially like to thank William “AfterDeath” Heimbigner for his help in scraping known proxy lists and listing positive hits in DroneBL. This sort of proactive effort I feel will give us an edge over netabusers.”

“Additionally, I would like to thank the people at IronPort which have been experimenting with our data. They have provided quite a bit of advice on ways that we can improve our service, which we look forward to implementing in the near future.”

The OPM which ceased operation in May 2006 (which we reported about on 7 May 2006) now recommends its users to switch to DroneBL.